For each IPA symbol, an English example is given where possible; here "RP" stands for Received Pronunciation. The foreign languages that are used to illustrate additional sounds are primarily the ones most likely to be familiar to English speakers, French, German, and Spanish. For symbols not covered by those, recourse is taken to the populous languages Mandarin Chinese, Hindustani, Arabic, and Russian. For sounds still not covered, other smaller but well-known languages are used, such as Swahili, Turkish, and Zulu.

The left-hand column displays the symbols like this: Template:Audio-pipe. Click on the speaker icon to hear the sound; click on the symbol itself for a dedicated article with a more complete description and examples from multiple languages. All the sounds are spoken more than once, and the consonant sounds are spoken once followed by a vowel and once between vowels.

The 'glottal stop', a catch in the breath. For some people, found in button [ˈbʌʔn̩], or between vowels across words: Deus ex machina [ˌdeɪəsˌʔɛksˈmɑːkɨnə]; in some nonstandard dialects, in a apple [ʌˈʔæpl̩].

(The English click used to imitate the trotting of a horse.) A hollow popping sound, like a cork pulled from a bottle. Several distinct sounds, written as digraphs, including [ kǃ ], [ ɡǃ ], [ ŋǃ ].

Template:NoteTemplate:Note These symbols are officially written with a tie linking them (e.g.t͡ʃ), and are also sometimes written as single characters (e.g.ʧ) though the latter convention is no longer official. They are written without ligatures here to ensure correct display in all browsers.

Two types of brackets are commonly used to enclose transcriptions in the IPA:

[Square brackets] indicate the phonetic details of the pronunciation, regardless of whether they are actually meaningful to a native speaker. This is what a foreigner who does not know the structure of a language might hear. For instance, the English word lulls is pronounced [ˈlɐɫz], with different el sounds at the beginning and end. This may be obvious to speakers of other languages, though a native English speaker might not believe it. Likewise, Spanish la bomba has two different b sounds to foreign ears, [laˈβomba], though a Spaniard might not be able to hear it. Omitting such detail does not make any difference to the identity of the word.

/Slashes/ indicate meaningful sounds called phonemes. Changing the symbols between slashes would either change the identity of the word or produce nonsense. Since there is no meaningful difference between the two el sounds in the word lulls, they need to be transcribed with the same symbol: /ˈlʌlz/. Similarly, Spanish la bomba is transcribed phonemically with a single b sound, /laˈbomba/. Thus a reader who is not familiar with the language in question might not know how to interpret these transcriptions.

A third kind of bracket is occasionally seen:

Either //double slashes// or |pipes| (or occasionally other conventions) show that the enclosed sounds are theoretical constructs that aren't actually heard. (This is part of morphophonology.) For instance, most phonologists argue that the -s at the ends of verbs, which surfaces as either /s/ in talks/tɔːks/ or as /z/ in lulls/lʌlz/, has a single underlying form. If they decide this form is an s, they would write it //s// (or |s|) to claim that phonemic /tɔːks/ and /lʌlz/ are essentially //tɔːks// and //lʌls// underneath. If they were to decide it was essentially the latter, //z//, they would transcribe these words //tɔːkz// and //lʌlz//.

Lastly,

‹Angle brackets› may be used to represent the orthographic representation: ‹lulls›, ‹la bomba› (technically ⟨lulls⟩, ⟨la bomba⟩, but this is not universally supported). Because they're easier to type, the less-than and greater-than signs (< >) that appear on most keyboards are commonly used for this purpose.[1]

If in the box to the left you see the symbol ‘’ rather than a lower-case open-tail g, you may be experiencing a well-known bug in the font MS Reference Sans Serif or other; switching to Lucida Sans Unicode or Arial Unicode should fix it.

The tie bar is intended to cover both letters of an affricate or doubly articulated consonant. However, if your browser uses Arial Unicode MS to display IPA characters, the following incorrectly formed sequences may look better than the correct order (letter, tie bar, letter) due to a bug in that font:

True angle brackets, ⟨ ⟩, are unsupported by several common fonts, and so have been replaced by ‹ › or < > in most Wikipedia articles. However,

↑Because < > are used in html, they may trigger an html element. For example, <i> on a web page would not show up as such but would instead italicize text that followed. This can be avoided by writing &lt; or &#60; or <nowiki><</nowiki> instead of <.